The Sigian Bracelet Read online

  THE

  SIGIAN BRACELET

  George Töme

  Copyright George Töme, 2017

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Published: 27 november 2017

  Padme Publishing House

  Website: www.TheSigianBracelet.com

  The book cover and the concept art of the website were made by Adam Kuczek, an incredibly talented concept artist who worked on some of the Hollywood’s biggest blockbuster movies. Check his art at www.ak-art.net.

  CHAPTER 1.

  Colenam, or Cole, as friends used to call him, was the “jure”1 of Sigarion, a small rural town raised close to the oceanfront. In a normal city, the jure held an important public position. Except that on the planet Antyra II there were no normal cities, and especially not Sigarion.

  With nothing better to occupy his mind, Cole stepped outside his dome and started to gaze mindlessly at the evening sky when a loose feeling of guilt pinched him by the tail. This time he wasn’t bothered that Antyra’s star was about to set over another day strewn with delays, the workers—brought to level the nearby hill—again falling behind schedule. It didn’t bother him at all because their supervisor promised to keep them working for a few more hours to make up for the lost time. In the light of the night. His guilt was to feel happy—happy for the first time in his life—that Antyra’s planetary system2 was locked inside a fiery firewall, the belly of the eternal god Beramis. His light was now helping the workers to keep up with the excavation.

  And who wouldn’t feel ashamed? The firewall was a weird space distortion that engulfed Antyra’s stellar system, depriving the Antyrans of any chance to reach behind it, whatever that “behind” meant. Not even the best-fireproofed probes could cross it, for they always exited on the same side: the inside. And if the probes couldn’t pass, unfortunately, the same happened with the photons coming from the star—they got stuck in the frontier and spread all over the sky in a mighty firewall, hotter and hotter with every passing year, dooming them all to a slow, painful death by overcooking.

  But the end of the world wouldn’t happen for about six thousand years, while Cole needed to finish the expansion of his dome now. The firewall was serving him well: due to an unhealthy dose of naïvety, he was fooled by the workers’ wild promises and—predictably—ran out of time. His smallest daughter was about to hatch five eggs, an extraordinary number for those days and certainly unheard of in their small community. The little ones would need darker nests in the first months of life because their eyes could get damaged from too much light. That came from the old times, when the Antyrans crammed into ice cities dug inside glaciers, as it was written in the Book of Creation Inrumiral.

  With understandable reluctance, Cole was about to stop the excavation to invite the workers to the generous dinner cooked by his female when a loud scream erupted in his backyard. Afraid that a serious accident might have happened, he ran there, followed by the others.

  “What is it this time?” the overseer shouted peevishly over Cole’s shoulder.

  The worker had lost his breath and barely managed to return a terrified gaze, too frightened to mutter anything. As he looked at the hill in front of the magneto-bulldozer track launcher, the problem became obvious to Cole, too: several bones of a skeleton were hanging out of the earth; the yellow remains, weathered by the long time they had stayed buried, protruded from a sandy ravine. They showed signs of exposure to extremely high temperatures. The sand had a greenish-black, glassy consistency in a compact layer below the skeleton and in some places above it, too. Amazingly, the bones survived the fiery furnace, hot enough to melt silica.

  Everyone was now speechless. Something seemed very wrong with the bones—they didn’t have the right size for an Antyran. No! Cole quelled his thoughts—he couldn’t afford to make assumptions about what he was seeing. He stepped forward, and the workers moved out of his way. He slowly bent close to the littered remains, and he began to remove the sand with hesitant moves from the left side of the excavation, where the skull ought to be.

  “Sh-should we call the security?” babbled one of the workers. “Maybe it’s not a good thing to touch them, if there’s a murd—” But he couldn’t finish his sentence because the skull came out… and it wasn’t Antyran.

  Cole shook his head in disbelief, seeing how his darkest forebodings had become reality. The three recessive gills behind his hearing lobe became purple, but he couldn’t stop his hands from digging. He kept going and going with jerky movements, aware that he was about to touch a god!

  Soon, the workers recovered enough from shock to run away, screaming in terror.

  The Antyrans were rather thin and agile creatures. Their slightly elongated heads were endowed with a pair of large, black, playful eyes and elastic nostrils that allowed them to sink nimbly under water. They had a prominent crest made of short, thick, skinny spikes, which they loved to paint or tattoo in fanciful ways, according to the day’s fashion. Another common practice in the Antyran female seduction kit was to scent each spine with a different fragrance, to impress the males with their aromary talents.

  Both the males and the females had slim waists, large shoulders, and a pair of long, stout arms. The typical right shoulder of the males was a bit larger than the left one, a reminder of the times when their ancestors had fought for domination (of course, this theory was never accepted by Zhan’s temples). They were also endowed with a robust tail. In order to prevent traffic disruptions and avoid slapping the nearby pedestrians with its wobbles (a very rude and, indeed, sexually charged gesture), they invented a sticky pocket on the back of their tunics, in which the tail could hang. The stickiness not only helped them fix the thing in place but also let them scratch its tip—which often itched in the most annoying way, always in a bad place and at the wrong time.

  Cole stopped digging to take a look at the skeleton, which no doubt had a greater stature than the Antyrans. He saw a strange metallic object on its right forearm, a massive, goldlike bracelet with a black symbol painted on it—sort of a star with three curved rays.

  There was a big patch of vitrified sand above the skeleton. Weary that it might collapse over the bones, Cole pulled out a few green pieces of glass. Another surprise came out of the sand: something was shining in the night light! It wasn’t another bracelet, as he first thought, but a compact wall of golden metal.

  “The fire chariot!” Feeling his strength melting away like a piece of ice in a hot oven, he walked, shaking, to the blade of the nearest magnetic bulldozer, to hold on it.

  Cole’s problem was that Antyra II was colonized only recently. The world didn’t have ancient cities, ruins, artifacts, or anything even remotely like that. And judging by the looks, the bones had spent quite a few centuries embedded in the sand. How could anything that old be buried there if the Antyrans had discovered cosmic flight only some 150 years ago?

  Even though Cole didn’t have the slightest idea how one of the gods should look—since all the stories described them as ethereal creatures bathed in a blinding light—the only logical explanation accepted by his kyi was that the skeleton in front of him was one of them, one of Zhan’s sons… the very gods who, on a beautiful summer morning, some 1,250 years before, had arrived on their home planet. It wasn’t actually a pleasant encounter. At least not for the Antyrans, if only because the gods burned their cities to the ground (starting with Raman’s3 capital), forbade Colhan’s ancient religion, and locked the whole star system inside the womb of Beramis—the distortion that held them captive ever since, hiding t
he stars. After such an awesome display of destruction, they went back to where they came, but not before investing an Antyran—called Baila I—as their first prophet.

  As soon as he managed to regain his balance, Cole jumped to his dome to call the authorities. He knew that speed was everything: if Zhan’s temples found out about this before Antyra’s Shindam,4 they’d grab the artifacts and erase any trace—including him and his large family.

  ***

  The archivists had to dig in a hurry. A pack of armored chameleon trucks belonging to the Shindam’s security had already sealed off the area, blocked the nearby traffic, and chased away the crowds attracted by the wild rumors, which spread like wildfire. This time, however, the reality had a good chance of beating their craziest guesses, since no one really suspected what had happened in Cole’s backyard. The bulldozer workers were locked inside Cole’s dome, and the jure and his family had disappeared—presumably moved from the planet for their own safety.

  As the bone fragments and the bits of a spaceship were unearthed, the archivists hurriedly packed them in crates and stored them in their nearby vehicles. Due to the haste, the usual care in handling such fragile artifacts was all but forgotten. The soldiers brought huge spotlights to enhance the night light and help the scholars work without breaks. In less than four days, the whole area was sieved. Cole’s dome was demolished to check the ground below it, and anything of interest was stored in chameleons. The trucks then drove to the nearest spaceport and loaded their precious cargo on an interplanetary spaceship belonging to the security forces.

  As soon as the spaceship took off to Antyra I, the archivists began to rummage through the boxes. They had four complete skeletons and fragments from at least ten other individuals, together with six goldlike bracelets and a bunch of garment patches (most likely spacesuits) made from an unknown fabric. They also found remnants of a golden ship shattered into small pieces by a terrible impact, with only a few fragments surviving unmelted and embedded in the glassy sand. Yet the reason for the crash wasn’t a mystery, being obvious at the very first glance: one of the damaged fragments had a hole right in the middle, its edges torn inside, the layers of composite materials melted and fused together. Obviously, such damage couldn’t have happened from the impact. Something nasty had hit the ship before it came down: either a powerful laser lens or a different energetic weapon, unlike anything Antyrans had in the past and probably still didn’t have now.

  As the findings were sorted and cataloged, Tadeoibiisi’s archivists became silent and worried. They instinctively felt that everything was about to change. What they held in their hands was the beginning of the madness, and they were its messengers. A madness that everyone wanted forgotten, buried for eternity in the obscure foldings of their history—in the same way that the gods’ bones stood buried in Cole’s backyard for so many peaceful centuries.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t have much hope of hiding the secret from the temples. No one succeeded—at least not with a secret of such magnitude. Their lives were in great danger, but it hardly mattered. For the gods had returned. Dead or alive, it was of no importance. The gods were here, in their hands, and certainly brought answers to many troubling questions, questions that the Antyrans didn’t even dare to ask.

  CHAPTER 2.

  The morning was a bit cold for that time of the year, to some Antyrans’ slight surprise, for they all but forgot it was still technically possible to shiver in the middle of the summer—or even freeze to death, like their ancestors used to, during the horrendous glaciations of the past. And they particularly forgot the remarkable phenomenon, caused by the eccentric axis rotation of Antyra I, when about once every several millennia, the North Pole migrated near the world’s only continent. Not that the axis steadied in the meantime—far from it—but with the firewall around them, the prospect of another pole wandering was the least worry to wrinkle their spikes. Zhan himself had promised, when he whispered the Book of Creation Inrumiral in the ear socket of his first prophet, Baila I, that he would personally return before the end of the world and save the righteous from baking.

  It was in fact this promise that brought millions of pilgrims—called “tarjis”—to Alixxor5 from all the inhabited Antyran planets. They came to climb the mighty pyramids6 erected in the central park and view the star-rise above the purple haze. To witness Zhan’s sacred light again defeating Arghail’s7 evil darkness.

  Through the morning mist, millions of lights glimmered from the traditional lamps fueled with moulan grease, stretching a ribbon of fire along the streets of Alixxor. The candle carriers were poised to assault the grueling hundreds of stone steps leading to the top of the pyramids.

  Karajoo, the feast of light, was about to begin.

  The purple bioluminescent bacteria floating in Antyra’s atmosphere gathered in a dense layer about six hundred feet from the ground, creating a fantastic picture in front of the pilgrims’ awestruck eyes. Down the streets, a purple-red sky was the only thing visible above their heads, but from the heights of the Great Pyramid platform, the layer looked like waves on a stormy sea, pierced by the tallest city temples and by murra, the holy trees seeded by Zhan.

  The tarjis were, of course, clueless about history’s wicked ways, but their final steps before the pyramids stirred the dust of another sacred road, a path followed by the ancient pilgrims during the old “heretical” religion before Zhan’s coming. For even before the times of the mythical Azaric, the winding path to the sixth mound was known as the “Path of Dreams,” where the believers gathered to be intoxicated by poisonous aromas and scary stories shared by the legendary aromaries. Then, they dreamed. They dreamed terrible nightmares, meant to scare Pixihe—the goddess of coldness—and chase away the winter from the island continent. Of course, where they failed, the new gods succeeded “in just a few days”—not only with Pixihe, but with Colhan himself, and all their stories were forgotten, crushed under the weight of the new religion. The sixth mound of the sacred road now lay buried under the colossal Zhan’s pyramid, destroyed like other pagan symbols. Because nothing was allowed to be more humongous than the three pyramids—a white-gold one for Zhan, a red-like-fire one for Beramis, and a blue-ocean-storm one for the goddess Belamia—nothing except murra, the tallest trees in the world. They were seeded by the gods some 1,250 years prior around the place where the three pyramids were supposed to be built. Baila I banned the Antyrans from trying to multiply the trees, and only the initiates were allowed to take care of them. They reached heights in excess of eight hundred feet, and their fleshy, juicy leaves overshadowed the pyramids with their whopping cover.

  Dressed in his ritual robes woven with platinum wires, the Great Prophet Baila XXI greeted the pilgrims’ river of fire, perched on a platform atop the highest murra, a tree taller than Zhan’s pyramid. The tarjis raised their candles toward the twilight sky, muttering the “Sacrifice of Beramis” litany8 in a trancelike intonation:

  “Hopelessly lost without his deep-blue eyes, ever since he gave them to us, Beramis wanders in the cave of death, forever slave of Arghail the Black,” they lamented, staring at the firewall that bordered their small bubble universe.

  The morning breeze stole their dissonant murmurs, carrying them to the farthest corners of the city.

  Baila XXI raised his holy rod over the tarjis’ heads, and they immediately fell to the pavement, their heads bowed into the dust.

  “Antyrans, soldiers of light!” he boomed over the prostrated crowd. “Antyra’s age is coming to an end! Sacrifice yourself for Zhan like Beramis once did, and you will rise to the heavens before the second rain of fire! Someday, you’ll be a part of Him!”

  He jerked his arms toward the sky in a spasmodic gesture to show them the wall of fire, and the electrified crowd jumped to their feet with delirious quivering. They immediately began to chant Zhan’s name—at first whispered, then louder and louder, till their murmurs became a deafening shout. The pilgrims’ orations rolled over Alixxor with the force
of a thousand thunders. Everyone on the streets—tarjis, initiates—and even some bystanders joined them. Then, suddenly, silence fell over the town. In a tiny dent in the wall of the Roch-Alixxor Mountains, just left of the lofty Eger Peak, a skittish morning ray started to dance. The dawn had begun!

  Far from the Karajoo feast, a Shindam spaceship—the same that several days ago had taken off from Antyra II, loaded with crates holding the strange discovery unearthed in Sigarion—landed in utmost secrecy on a military spaceport in western Alixxor, taking advantage of the last vanishing shadows of the quasi-night. A column of armored chameleons with their camouflage activated rushed on the tarmac, surrounding it. The troops jumped into the ship and quickly unloaded a bunch of black boxes. As soon as they finished loading the precious cargo in their chameleons, they drove swiftly to a nearby secret base.

  ***

  Gill couldn’t find a good reason why he kept staring at the three stars. They didn’t have anything special, hanging like that in a black sky littered with millions and millions of other lights just like them. And yet, he was spying them through a lens. He knew all too well what was about to happen: the lights would start to move. At first slowly, then faster and faster, they would run away from the motionless sky and hide in the darkest corner, colder and deeper than any other one. He eagerly craved to see them closer. He was about to fulfill his wish because he was falling toward them, through them, with roaring terror.

  He didn’t make it to the destination, being awakened rather brutally from the tentacles of this strange dream by an annoying ringing. It was an incoming call on his holophone. Damn! Now he remembered all too well the three little square stars—because on the last few nights, the sticky nightmare had haunted his sleep, filling him with anxiety. Had he been superstitious, he surely would have interpreted it as a bad omen—after all, he was one of Zhan’s traitors. Tonight, I’m going to dream it through the end, if only Tadeo will leave me alone, he promised to himself.